1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image capturing apparatus for acquiring captured images from multiple viewpoints and an image processing method thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
An image capturing apparatus for acquiring captured images from multiple viewpoints has been proposed (for example, Aaron Isaksen et al. “Dynamically Reparameterized Light Fields”, Proc. ACM. SIGGRAPH, pp. 297-306, 2000). This image capturing apparatus includes a plurality of image capturing units. Each image capturing unit captures an image, thereby acquiring captured images from multiple viewpoints. After the image capturing, the captured images are synthesized to generate an image (to be referred to as a blur image hereinafter) containing a blur corresponding to the distance from the reference viewpoint on the object, an image having a high spatial frequency, an image having a wide dynamic range, or the like. Especially, blur image generation has an effect of making the main object stand out by blurring the background and is useful in taking a photo of a person. Such an image capturing apparatus that captures images from multiple viewpoints will be referred to as a multi-eye camera hereinafter.
The multi-eye camera includes a lot of lenses as many as the number of image capturing units. For this reason, there is a high probability that the user shoots with the lenses covered with his/her finger. Covering the lenses with the user's finger will be referred to as “finger-covering” hereinafter. If a captured image group obtained by the multi-eye camera includes an image with a defect by finger-covering or the like, image synthesis may fail, or the accuracy may lower.
To prevent this, a technique has been proposed which notifies the user of detection of finger-covering on a multi-eye camera by highlighting in a display (for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2010-114760). However, the user may ignore the notification and shoot without removing the finger.